The decline of wildlife along the Mekong River, and really in all of Southeast Asia, has reached crisis levels. Between widespread development and the Chinese desire to kill every mammal in existence, there isn’t much left. On the Mekong, home of many now rare and amazing species, we are at crunch time in what is probably a losing battle. Among the fundamental problems when it comes to aquatic life is that you have to convince fishermen that not killing as many animals as possible is worth their effort. The only way to do that is cash because for poor people, every fish, every deer, every thing period, counts toward feeding their families. Of course, paying off large segments of a population has never been tried and probably would not work anyway, but without state intervention or convincing people to not kill the last of these animals, the Mekong ecosystem will be pretty well denuded of animal life.

When I was in that region of the world (SE Asia, not just the Mekong region), now more than a decade ago, it was striking – in the north of Thailand, anything that flew lower than a hornbill was likely to find itself in a cooking pot. The more interesting wildlife tended to be in cages or aquariums, soon to be food or ‘medicine’. I understand that the Cambodian government has since made an effort to move the obvious signs of poverty off of the main road into Angkor Wat, but it’s anything but a surprise that the people in the are of Tonle Sap are going to overfish the lake (if they have the means), and that overfishing would continue right on down the river.

The CPP thinks the problem is tourists complaining about the beggar children.

Not the beggar children, or their parents’ lousy alternatives, or the eradication of unique species like the Irrawady dolphin.

So that’s where the solution ‘let’s try giving money to the people eating the endangered ______’ might be worth a try. It’s not like national dignity is at stake in Cambodia–barangs handing poor Khmer people cash to incentivize the behaviors more desired by Westerners is a well understood mechanism.

I’m not familiar with local culture in the Lao PDR, so maybe someone who is can speak to the question, Would throwing money at the problem, where “problem”=overfishing and no hunting limits, be considered insulting or the purview of government up the river?

If not, this is a GREAT place to try paying locals to not kill everything that is made out of protein.

True, but since the people are actually already here, we’d best work with that fact. Introducing a plague is a horror plot, not a policy option. We have to make sure that the people have an option for material security beyond slaughtering everything that moves.

The general sentiment of most “it’s overpopulation’s fault!” arguments is that Something Must Be Done about population itself, with the undertone that the global south’s poor are just plain having too many kids and that family planning is the right solution. Aside from being a profoundly colonial sentiment, it also takes a symptom as a cause: improving economic conditions does stabilize population growth.

While I have a problem with the telos of most development models, it’s statistically well established that lowering infant mortality and increasing educational opportunities (especially for girls) has a marked effect on birth rates. Exploitation and inequality are drivers of population growth, and solutions will come from attention to these problems, not from whinging about how people need to stop having kids.

The “correct word”? “Whinge” has been around since the 12th century. I’ll grant that it sounds a bit stuck-up (though I swear, words like this just pop into my brain as I write) but there’s nothing “incorrect” about it. Prescriptivists! Everywhere prescriptivists!

The problem with the overpopulation complaints is that it’s always “those people” who are having more children than the earth can sustain. You never hear people turning around to say, “and that’s why I favor a strong national policy aimed at radically reducing America’s birth rate, and also sending decent amounts of aid money to Cambodia so that all Cambodian children have food security and access to well-run, free schools. And let’s make it a priority to help India reduce its truly terrible rate of malnutrition in children, as long as we’re out and about, doing stuff.” Well, you don’t even really hear the last part so much, but it would be nice too. People who aren’t at the brink of starvation don’t need to kill everything that moves to get by. Educated women have fewer children. It’s right to be miserable about the dolphins, and feel guilty about handing your children a much shittier world than the one you got, but trying to fix it exclusively from the dolphin end of things is kind of the wrong way around. (not to say there aren’t probably some relatively easy technological fixes that should be pushed for.)